


Dichotomy

by SparkleZombie



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29888139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SparkleZombie/pseuds/SparkleZombie
Summary: Once upon a time, Doctor Quinzel was assigned to Victor Zsasz.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	1. Shark Skin.

When she was still Harleen Quinzel, she was briefly assigned to speak to Victor Zsasz.

She, like all of Gotham, knew his story. It was a tragedy, right up until the first murder. Then it turned to a suspense story- this young god, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and riches beyond reason, how far he fell from grace, how absolute his trauma, how empty his coffers, how alone, how afraid, how. how, how, how?

How did darling Icarus choose to rebuild his wings with blood and scar tissue?

The suspense turns to horror. The transformation from protagonist to monster is complete. Those who still insist on hoping for a happy ending are a percent of a percent. The monster is reviled, and the monster revels in the terror he sows. He reaps them all, no pattern to the path he carves through the city.

Victor Zsasz is thirty-three years old when she meets him. Eight years removed from the traumatic event of his parents’ death. Five years removed from his first murder.  
She can see some of his trademark tally marks peaking out from under the metal collar around his neck.

“Is that really necessary,” she asks, gesturing to the collar and the guide poles attached to it, to the guard working to hook the collar to a leash bolted to the wall. The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is a reference to the last psychiatrist- Victor smiles briefly at the mention of his good work.

“I find the straightjacket a tad demeaning,” Victor sighs as the guards leave. Victor fidgets slightly. Harleen finds the efforts to keep Victor in check… not demeaning, but there’s something wrong here. She’s comfortable enough on a metal folding chair, placed within a square of yellow safety tape on the floor. Victor is standing across the room, wrapped in a straightjacket, guide collar chained to the wall. All that’s missing is some kind of mask, Harleen thinks.

She stands up and leaves her notebook on the chair, disregarding the distance rules when it comes to Victor. His eyes are dark behind unruly blond hair as he assesses her.

“Did you ever see Jaws, Mister Zsasz?”

He turns his head, watching her as she casually strides around the room. “I think I have, perhaps. I don’t exactly get out to the cinema these days. Why?”

Harleen smiles a little. “There’s a monologue in it, I think of it when I see you. It’s about sharks, of course…” She taps a finger to her lips in thought. “You ever see a shark’s eyes, chief,” she quotes aloud, “they’re dead eyes, black, like a doll’s eyes, you don’t even know it’s a living thing…” She shrugs. “It’s something like that.”

Victor contorts himself slightly. If he were any other patient it would look like he was trying to get out of the restraints; Harleen knew he had developed an affectation of perplexing, sometimes jittery and painful-looking movement. “The point, Doctor?”

Harleen is too close. They’re both calculating the situation. The wall strap is slacked. He can close the gap and injure her before she could utter a syllable of terror. She can slam her pen into one of those dark eyes.

“What do you see when you look at me, Mister Zsasz?”

He makes a perulent face. “Am I supposed to say ‘a shark,’ to keep in line with the theme du jour?”

“No, I just brought that up because of the monologue.” She spreads her hands, inviting. “Seriously, tell me what you see.”

Victor is quick. “If I say 'my mother’ do I get to leave early for good grades?”

Harleen is quick, too. “No, in fact, you have to stay and write 'I will not gross out Doctor Quinzel’ on a chalkboard a few hundred times.”

Victor giggles. The sound makes Harleen think not of sharks but of the gargoyles that adorn much of the old architecture downtown.

Victor closes his eyes and breathes deep. “You’ve no doubt read my file,” he says. “So you know my answer. You are rot, Doctor. You are something that should not be, and every moment I am not freeing you from the sickening confines in which you are trapped makes me itch with a slippery, crude mix of disgust and need. I need to save you, Doctor. I need to dig around inside you and make you a part of me.”

His eyes open. 

“I have just the spot for your tally mark.”


	2. Glass.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An occurance.

Harleen takes off her glasses and purses her lips. She taps her pen against her notepad. She’s watching some security footage, trying to get a bead on her newest patient. Her time- work, after work, trying to sleep- is split between him and the Jon Doe who insists on calling her ‘Harley.’ She looks at her notepad and sighs. Her swooping cursive fills the top half of the page with facts. The red ink of her personal thoughts bleed over her words.

“Zsasz, Victor. 33. Male. Trauma. (Parents- accident? autopsies?) Addiction (chem. dep. replaced w/ murder???) Self-Mutilation (takes care of cuts. no indic. of infection) Obsessive-Compulsion to kill and note each kill w/ scar 'tally mark’ (HOW MANY????? gcpd says he’s killed 40- MUCH MORE SCARRING- suicide attempts? Has he really killed that many) Poses bodies of victims in mockery of victim’s life (confirmed for stalking at least three before killing) No M.O. (!!!!) How do I get him to talk to me?”

She underlines the last line and looks at the footage from the morning. Victor was a grainy shape in the upper right of the CCTV screen. He was eating. Then he stood up, walked across the screen to another table. Three guards had their guns drawn. According to the witnesses, Victor had walked over to ask to borrow some salt. He returned fo his table, emptied the salt shaker onto his tray, broke the shaker, and managed to gouge out another inmate’s eye before he was hit with a Taser and subdued.

Harleen wonders.

—

“Why did you attack that inmate this morning, Mister Zsasz?”

Victor is wrapped in a straightjacket, his guide collar is chained to the strap bolted to the wall. His left eye is swollen shut. A guard had punched him while he was unconscious. His blond hair is tangled. Someone’s blood is still staining it.

“Perhaps he looked at my funny. Maybe a glint in his eye reminded me of a childhood bully” he hisses. “Does that help you help me, Doctor? Are you inside my mind now? Do watch your step in there, you’re treading on dreams, you know.” He grins like a hungry dog.

Harleen has learned to ignore Victor’s antagonising. She presses. “Removing someone’s eye, however violently, won’t result in death, which is what you crave. Why not go for the neck? Why not go for a sure thing? You’re many things, but a torturer is not one of them, Mister Zsasz.”

He leers at her. “I contain multitudes, Doctor Quinzel.”

She stares ahead. His head droops, and he takes a deep breath, drawing himself up. 

“I like to watch. I like to get close, see that, that je ne sais quoi, the flicker of the divine that flashes in the eyes when that wretched meat is for the first time alive, in my hands, their blood and mine …and then- ah, gone.” He shudders and groans and his undamaged eyelid flutters- like the contorting movements, this supposed sexual gratification is part of his act. 

There’s gotta be something in Gotham’s water, Harleen muses later. Ya got grown men dressing up like bats and serial killers pretendin’ to get off on their crimes. And that’s just on a Monday.

Victor sags. Harleen scribbles something in her notes. 

“Mister Zsasz,” she says, “was the assault foreplay for you? Were you telling the world, 'here’s my next tally mark, no one else touch him’?”

He moans and writhes in his trappings. “You make my machinations sound so crude, Doctor Quinzel.”

“You just pretended to climax at the thought of your previous actions.”

Victor steaightens up and snickers, wheezy and cold. “Ah, point taken, my dear doctor. I do apologise.” He cracks his neck and licks his lips.

“You really want some answers, Doctor?” He smiles an empty, cold smile.

“Let us chat.”


	3. Mythology.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comparisons are made.

Harleen startles when she walks into the interview room. A guard with a pair of orange-handled office scissors is dispassionately hacking at Zsasz’s hair.

”What are you doing?”

”Orders from higher-up, Doc. He’s gotta be restrained most of the time, so this mess is just gettin’ more tangled. ‘S a health hazard.”

Harleen frowns, eyes on her patient. “It’s cutting into my time with him. You can finish later.” She dismisses the guard with a wave of her pen. The guard shrugs and walks out, scissors in his fist.

”Well.” Harleen drags the folding chair close, rules be damned. Zsasz looks pitiful. He’s in his straightjacket, which is haphazardly tied to a rigid chair. His head hangs. Blond locks litter the floor, looking like scattered feathers.  
Harleen briefly recalls the nickname the tabloids had given Zsasz, back when he was still Victor, back when he was falling from grace- Gotham’s Icarus.

”Well,” Harleen starts again. “How are you, Mister Zsasz?”

He mumbles. Harleen can hear the sounds but cannot make out the words. He had been so talkative yesterday, she thinks. He had been quoting a poem about the Titan Prometheus and seemed genuinely pleased that she had caught on quickly. He compared himself to Prometheus, claiming that his horrific acts were akin to Prometheus’s compassionate act of bringing fire to humanity, and, where the Titan was punished by being chained the the mountainside and enduring an eagle eating his liver, Zsasz considered his accomodations at Arkham Asylum ‘essentially the same.’

Poetry. Mythology. 

”Feeling like Sampson today?”

His shoulders shake. “You presume I have a power and it was hidden in my hair?” he wheezes. Harleen smiles a small smile.

”Wouldn’t be the wei- most peculiar sight in this Asylum, Mister Zsasz.”

He hums in agreement, then raises his head to look at her. Harleen‘s eyes go wide behind her glasses.

There is something about how horribly his hair was hacked, something about how it’s still long over one eye, something about how the buzzing overhead lights make the shadows on his face weird and angular, something about the way, for a second, his eyes are full of human fear, something that, for an instant, makes Harleen see Victor, age twenty-five, just learning of the deaths of his parents, that fills Harleen with pity.

And then just as quickly he is gone, and Zsasz is there, thirty-three, his skin a graveyard of cramped with tombstone scars.

Harleen is back to the present moment, pity shriveled and conquered by clinical detachment.

”As for how I am feeling,” Zsasz says gently, “would it bother you if I said, ah, ‘itchy’?”

”Why would it bother me?”

He grins coldly. “Because I desperately need you to scratch the itch for me, Doctor.”

The air grows thick with silence.

Victor bows his head, giggling. “Right here, if you please, it is driving me- if you’ll forgive the use of the word- mad.”

Alarms are going off in Harleen’s head as she reaches out and rakes her short painted nails across Zsasz’s scalp. He lets out a sigh and leans ever so slightly into her touch.

Harleen thinks of a very specific sort of animal- a pet, lost or abandoned, running to a wild it never knew, living on instinct and living by fang and claw; wandering and trespassing in the places it used to belong.

Zsasz was a human, once.

”I’m surprised you’re letting me touch you at all,” Harleen muses. “Isn’t this nauseating for you? Having a corpse scratch your head?”

Zsasz leans away from the touch and shrugs. “We all make sacrifices to obtain what we want, don’t we?” He studies her; she realizes in all the time she’s been his therapist it is this moment they are close enough to see in each other’s eyes.

There is nothing behind his gaze. No spark of madness, no glint of mischief, no glimmer of humanity. Only darkness, wide and deep.

Zsasz turns his head. ”What are you going to sacrifice, Doctor?”

Harleen won’t let another patient worm his way into her thoughts. “I’ve made plenty of sacrifices to get here, Mister Zsasz. We‘re only allotted so much time, and I put a lot of it into school. What about you?” She points her pen at him.

”What will you sacrifice to rejoin the human condition and find peace?”

He giggles again, mirthless and hollow. The darkness in his eyes deepens.

”What ever makes you think I am not at peace, Harleen?”


End file.
